The morning of the Oscar nominations, I got a surprise. None of the nominations themselves were very surprising, but when I was going through and counting the past number of nominations for each nominee, I was surprised to learn that Christopher Plummer, at age 80, and a full fifty years after his motion picture debut in Sidney Lumet's Stage Struck, received his very first one. And frankly, he has thrown a monkey wrench in all my predictions and prognostications. It's his first nomination, he's 80 and he's playing a real-life person -- Leo Tolstoy, no less -- in The Last Station (352 screens). It doesn't even matter that the movie isn't very good and that Helen Mirren steals the movie away from him as Tolstoy's long-suffering wife. Plummer has become a serious contender.

Plummer has enjoyed one of those amazing careers as a supporting actor, having appeared in a broad range of interesting movies, but never stealing anyone else's thunder. In his early days, he worked with Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann. Both Spike Lee and Terry Gilliam have worked with him twice. He was in The Sound of Music, even if everybody remembers Julie Andrews. He was in The Man Who Would Be King as Rudyard Kipling, even if everybody remembers Michael Caine and Sean Connery. He was Hamlet, Cyrano de Bergerac, Sherlock Holmes, Santa Claus, and Mike Wallace (in The Insider). He can appear in movies as disparate as The Return of the Pink Panther, Dragnet (1987), or Oliver Stone's Alexander, and come away unscathed, still distinguished enough for casting consideration the next year.

One of my favorite roles of his was as the Shakespeare-quoting Klingon General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991); his pure relish for the part made him one of the all-time great "Star Trek" villains (yes, even better than Eric Bana in the new reboot). He also brought some dignity to the evil white people as Captain Newport in Terrence Malick's masterpiece The New World (2005). This past year was one of his best. In addition to The Last Station, he provided voices for both 9 and Up, played Caesar in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (a movie that appears to have no distribution at the moment), and -- my favorite -- the title role in Terry Gilliam's already underrated The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

The most amazing thing about Plummer is that he doesn't really seem 80. He works often and in energetic roles in energetic films. He has made more movies than ever this past decade, and more of them have received wide distribution. He never appears tired or worn out; he looks like he can keep up with any of his co-stars. He also has a distinguished air that might belong to a great British actor, except that Plummer is actually Canadian. (Glad I looked that up.) He may actually be too vital to win the Oscar this year; the voters may just assume that he'll make five more movies next year, and be ready for another nomination ten years from now, when he's still spry at 90. But now that Plummer has earned some much-deserved attention, I think it's time for a Christopher Plummer DVD double-feature. I know what I want to see. How about you?